This thesis presents insight into research trends of academic literature on the topic of information literacy over the years 2016-2014.

Information literacy is a topic relevant to a wide range of research and professional fields, but in order to share knowledge effectively it is necessary to understand the connotations and priorities associated with the area in different contexts. An accurate and up to date understanding of current issues and established topics is important to plan future work in this research area.

This thesis describes the knowledge domains in this topic and the relationships between them over recent years. It uses a domain-analytic approach with bibliometric data to investigate the structures and trends in academic publication on this research domain, giving a broad view of the information in multiple fields.

A set of a total of 8582 documents with bibliographic metadata were downloaded from the Web of Science following a precisely selected query. The data was cleaned, mapped through co-word analysis and co-citation analysis in VOSViewer, adjusted for the most useful clustering parameters, and examined. In addition to representing the overall knowledge structures as networks, the data was divided into three subsets by publication year in order to observe changes over time.

The results indicated that the key fields working on this topic are LIS, medicine, and education, with psychology, computer science, and linguistics playing smaller roles. They share some focus areas but have distinctly different concepts associated with the topic. New subtopics have gained prominence over the period studied.